Social Media Strategy: 10 Tips

Social Media Strategy

Have a professional social media strategy (properly designed) is a very powerful marketing advantage for any modern enterprise. The strong development of social networks is the answer to an increasing demand from users: to stay connected to the others.

In fact, the more successful your business is, the better it becomes at social media marketing. A chicken and egg story?

Share experiences, situations and views with different people. This is part and parcel of our social being that has integrated these tools into your daily life.

These new communication channels can be used by companies as another channel within their communication strategies. Provided it is efficiently used, it can serve to have a direct connection with both current and potential customers.

But implementing a successful social media strategy is not as simple as it might seem, so here you are 10 tips about how to built your social media strategy:

Time is crucial: One of the most common mistakes when starting working on Social Networks is to think that is just a matter of opening accounts in Facebook and Twitter. And that is all, the rest is automatic. But it is not that easy. Achieve a strong social media presence requires constant work and compromise. While it is true that some contents go viral, it is also true that there is no recipe to “make” contents go viral.

Rely on professional experts: Some people think that fellows can take over social networks “because they are young and understand Twitter and this stuff”. That is the same as sending an inexperienced police officer to negotiate with kidnappers. To obtain positive results you will need to hire a Social Media Manager to implement a good strategy and to manage the organization accounts.You need a budget: Nothing in life is free and much less a social network strategy. Consider whether to hire a Social Media Manager depending on the organization size: to develop the social media strategy (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.). It would be also necessary to have a Community Manager: to be responsible for the account management and to interact with the public. Even though the outlay increases if there are multiple accounts to manage, or several languages

Target or Goal Setting: Goals will tell us: how many people we need; which networks use, what resources make use of and how much it will cost in total. They also allow to define indicators that measure how our strategy is performing.

Everyone should be involved: Social networks should not be encapsulated or monopolized by any department or area in the organization. Work on Social Networks must be transverse: throughout the entire organization; all the departments being part of a well-structured social network.

Active monitoring: It is not just posting messages on social networks. We must listen! We have to know what is said about our organization, who supports us, who does not support us, our messages becoming trending topic on social networks.

If something cannot be measured it does not exist: There are plenty of indicators that can be used to measure the performance of a social networks strategy: Likes, Retweetts, number of impressions, number of clicks, people talking about this, number of downloads, number of followers, fans, comments, etc. If there is something that social networks produce these are data.

Do not be afraid of being criticized: Are there any negative comments on Facebook? On the blog? On the web? Do not panic, there will be always negative comments. Not everyone will agree with what we do or how we do it. They will not disappear because we ignore them. So you have to listen to them. And understand their motivations to act correctly.

Transparency: Social networks are generating a profound change in the way organizations communicate with the public and their beneficiaries. It is no longer possible to control the message, neither worth making it up. We must be frank with the public and provide access to all information that the organization can share.

Have clear rules of use: Set the rules of the game. The organization needs rules for the social networks use by its employees. The staff must know that the comments made on social networks can have a direct impact on the organization’s image. When someone from the staff wants to make a sensitive statement they must make clear that this is their opinion and not the organization’s.

Without doubt, if you heed our advice you will implement a successful social media strategy for your company.